10/30/2012

A Brief Note on Climate Change in the Wake of the Storm:
All over the mighty internets, people are tapping away, asking the question, as The New Yorkerdoes, "Is climate change responsible for Hurricane Sandy?" With no scientific, meteorological, or climatological experience beyond "I read some shit," let the Rude Pundit answer: "Fuck yes." Or, more precisely, "How the fuck is that even a question for anyone who hasn't been rendered stupider than a tenth generation dalmatian by watching Fox 'news' or been reading brain-mallet websites like Newsmax or been ear-raped by Rush Limbaugh?"

While Washington drags its feet like the tendons have been cut, everywhere else, people are behaving as if they'd come to the conclusion, "Well, hell, this is the new climate." The Rude Pundit has written on how the New York City MTA had already begun to deal with rising sea levels, and that was before last night's disaster flick flooding of the subways.

Being interviewed this morning on 1010WINS, the NYC all-news station, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that it's time for the state and federal governments to come up with a plan for New York that deals with how climate change has affected the state's weather. "We've had two hundred-year storms in two years," Cuomo said, referring to Irene and Sandy. This is normal now. Cuomo wants to explore building a levee for Manhattan.

Remember your evolution, people. When the mutations take the place of what exists, the mutation becomes the species and is no longer considered a mutation. The same goes for weather and storms we used to refer to as "freak." We're not just talking recent hurricane magnet New York/New Jersey. We're talking the whole damn country, the whole damn world.

The fact that the subject has been absent from the presidential campaign is shameful and a slap against all the victims, from the fires on the West Coast to the drought in the middle to the floods right here, right now.